Menu

Day: July 24, 2010

Thousands of people from New York City have moved into the metro-Atlanta area. My son and other organizers decided to have a complete week-end of festivities for New Yorkers in the south. Many will actually be coming down from New York City to join in the celebration.

Therefore, I must support this effort and in the process get to see old friends that I haven’t seen in a decade or more.

Andrew Breitbart has a job to do and he does it well. Breitbart’s job is to lie and distort the truth in order to advance a right-wing agenda, embarrass liberals, and undermine the Obama administration.

Breitbart is not a journalist, researcher, or pundit. He is a propagandist. He operates several websites (BigGovernment, BigJournalism, and BigHollywood), where he and other right-wing bloggers spew their political pornography. The articles that appear on these websites are contemporary versions of what historian Richard Hofstadter called, in a famous 1964 essay, the “paranoid style” of American politics practiced by extreme conservatives.

Breitbart is part of the “paranoid style” conservative echo chamber that includes Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin, and thousands of lesser-known activists who use a combination of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative publications, and the new media (emails, blogs, youtube, facebook) to mobilize support for their right-wing crusade. Breitbart was a featured speaker at the Tea Party conference in Nashville in February and is a frequent guest on Fox News and right-wing TV and radio talk shows. His websites are propaganda vehicles for building a political movement. Unlike Fox News, he doesn’t even pretend to be “fair and balanced.” What much of America learned this week is that Andrew Breitbart is unfair and unbalanced.

[…]

What’s distressing is not that Breitbart does his job, but that the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, including the Obama Administration, take him seriously. The recent dust-up over the firing of federal Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, fueled by a doctored video on Breitbart’s website, is only the latest example of this.

Since he began his website operation, Breitbart has sought to inject himself and his blogger network into the political debate. Sometimes he succeeds in getting wider attention, outside the right-wing silo, for the manufactured scandals he tries to provoke.

Breitbart’s public visibility has peaked twice, according to an analysis of stories on the Lexis/Nexis database.

[…]

Regardless of what he’s called, the Sherrod story is a good example of Breitbart’s skill at what academics call “agenda-setting” and “framing”. A week ago, hardly anyone had ever heard of Shirley Sherrod. Now, she’s practically a household name. And many people who might not recognize her name at least know something of the story. In the past few days, almost every major news outlet has published or broadcast something about this story. That’s the art of agenda-setting.

Florida Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio continued his war of words with Rachel Maddow this week with a new web video tweaking the MSNBC host.

Here’s the backstory: Last week, Rubio’s camp rolled out a one-minute ad making the case that his economic plan “is right” as evidenced by the fact that “Maddow thinks it’s wrong.” After the release of the spot, it didn’t take long for Maddow to fire back.

“Mr. Rubio’s new commercial is all about the economy, which makes sense, because he is running in Florida where the economy is really very, very bad,” Maddow said on her show. “Unemployment in Florida stands at 11.4 percent, higher than the national average. Foreclosures up nearly 10 percent in the first half of this year in Florida, higher than the national average. And Florida’s most recent state budget needed a rescue from federal stimulus funds, which, of course, Marco Rubio opposes. These are troubled times, time to call for big ideas, detail arguments, facts.”

In his new ad Rubio fired back: “And now, Rachel Maddow responds by discussing the Obama-Crist economic record for Florida…” text reads on top of footage of the news program. “But if you are ready for some real change … Send Marco to Washington and he’ll be a check-and-balance against Obama and his policies.”

Before soliciting campaign donations at the end of the spot, Rubio’s camp takes one last parting shot at the MSNBC personality: “Again. Maddow. 9pm. (We hear she has a blog too. Knock yourself out.)”

So, what she is recommends is to do nothing but issue subpoenas if they were to win back the majority in the House. That’s funny because when they should have been issuing subpoenas during the Bush administration disaster, they never did. Dems were the only ones issuing subpoenas thanks to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA).

Yesterday, Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) spoke to the GOP Youth Convention in Washington. One attendee asked Bachmann about what the Republicans will do if they win back the House:

QUESTION: I might be putting the cart before the horse here, but assuming the Republicans win the House back this next cycle, how do you feel about the chances for a little oversight and a little accountability now that the Republicans would have the subpoena power? How aggressive do you think?

BACHMANN: Well I think that’s all we should do. I think all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another and expose all the nonsense that has gone on. And it’s very important when we come back that we have constitutional conservative leadership, because the American people’s patience is about this big. […]

And this is the year, this is it. All of our chips are on November. If we don’t get it back and then starve the beast, the House – we have the power of the purse – so we can starve Obamacare, we don’t have to fund any of these programs. And that’s exactly what we need to do: defund all of this nonsense and then unwind it.

Bachmann’s comments echo those of many of her GOP colleagues calling for more investigations of the Obama Administration and a defunding or outright repeal of the new health care law. And considering that some in the Republican Party are afraid to put forth an agenda, fearing that their policies could hurt them in November, Bachmann’s remarks follow naturally. There’s no time for meaningful policy discussion if the GOP spends all its time having “one hearing after another” investigating fabricated controversies and attempting a highly unlikely defunding of health care reform.